Monday, September 29, 2008

Many a times, our computers become slow with-in weeks/months of use. The main reason being the installation of many unknown softwares, or some softwares that install other unwanted software's without our notice. There's one small utility called CCleaner which I have personally used for quite sometime with wonderful results.

CCleaner is a freeware Software. It's an excellent tool which serves different purposes like system optimization, privacy and cleaning tool. What it does is that it removes all the unused files from your system making Windows to run much faster.

CCleaner also clears all the history pertaining to your online browsing. It also sports a full fledged registry cleaner.

So if you think of cleaning up your registry and speed it up the likes of which mostly only a freshly formatted and reinstalled machine would give you, this is the definitely the tool for you.

Monday, September 22, 2008

Well, first of all thanks to all those numerous mails that I received from you all yesterday - it was my birthday yesterday. Unfortunately my residence's BSNL Broadband hasn't been up and running for the last 2+ weeks, so it's been a bit tough to catch up with the latest happenings online.

As a birthday gift (I suppose since Govt. organizations don't work on Sundays) BSNL rectified the issues on my broadband yesterday and I had connectivity for the later part of the day.

I was pleasantly surprised to see 61 scraps from my friend's over at Orkut - this apart from the numerous calls and messages I received. Another equal number of messages over at Facebook too. What surprises me is that so many of my pals(100+) from across the world are hooked to these social networking medium even on weekends. It's simply a great convenience as most of them would have never known when my birthday was - had it not been for these social networking sites.

Monday, September 15, 2008

From the time Apple released the new iTunes version 8, some of the Windows Vista users are getting the most famed "Blue Screen of Death". I believe this problem is due to the extra software that is being installed along with iTunes. Coz, when you downgrade back to iTunes 7.7 - everything works fine again. But actually, in order to avoid errors you'll apparently have to uninstall all Apple software and doing this always result in some data loss.

Well, the problem was discovered to be caused due to an update to a driver known as "GEARAspiWDM.sys." Its used in Windows to help third-party applications(like iTunes) write to CD and DVD drives, but it also has a history of causing trouble in the form of system crashes (read - the Blue Screen of Death).

Well, there's also another driver being identified in crash reports. It is centered around an updated USB controller driver, which appears to be in use when the iPod device is connected. This is due to the fact that the crash happens as the iPod is recognized via USB.

The above crash problems are not the only issue for Apple as of now. Additional testing of the software on Windows computers by security experts indicate that Apple is still installing MobileMe(a crap software) without users' consent. you don't even have a choice with this crap software while installing. However, Apple appears to be giving users an option to uninstall the service through the Windows Control Panel with the new installer.

I came across some amazing information on the eve of Google's 10th Birthday. I was casually flipping through NewYork Times and came across this information.

Google had applied for incorporation as a business 10 years ago which is according to a time line supplied by Google. The application was accepted on 7th September - which was a Sunday.

In that decade, Google has very quickly emerged as the most successful business on the Web, and many expect it to dominate the next era of computing as thoroughly as Microsoft dominated the era of personal computers.

Here's a quick snapshot of Google by the numbers along with some comparisons to Microsoft. The sources of the data are the companies annual reports, Yahoo Finance and comScore.

Google's age: 10Microsoft's age: 33

Google's revenue in the last 4 quarters: $19.6 billionMicrosoft's revenue in the last 4 quarters: $60.4 billion

Microsoft's revenue at age 10: $140 million($279 million in today’s dollars)

Google's revenue per hour in the last 4 quarters: $2.2 millionMicrosoft's revenue per hour in the last 4 quarters: $6.9 million

Google's net income in the last 4 quarters: $4.85 billionMicrosoft's net income in the last 4 quarters: $17.6 billion

Google employees, as of June 30th: 19,604Microsoft employees, as of May 31st: 89,809

Friday, September 12, 2008

About Onam : Onam is considered as the national festival of Kerala - The southern state of India, also called as God's Own Country. Onam is celebrated in honour of the late mythical Asura king Mahabali of ancient Kerala. It is a popular belief among Malayalees that on Onam day Bali visits his subjects. Onam usually falls in the Harvest season of August / September.

Well, I'm not a Malayalee myself and the festival isn't for me and this article isn't anything to do with technology - sorry.

Thursday, September 11, 2008

There are many a times when we could have forgotten the all exclusive Windows XP Administrator password in our home or office system. I have detailed down the few steps that will be needed for you to easily reset your Administrator password in Windows XP.

Here we go with the steps.

Boot your system with the Windows XP Setup CD. A screen will come up to welcome you, then you'll have an option to accept the EULA agreement, etc - proceed as required.

Then you will get an option to install XP afresh or "Repair your existing Windows XP installation". Choose to Repair by pressing “R”.

It will then start the repair process by first copying files the files needed.

In a few minutes, the setup will begin to restart your system and when it restarts remember NOT to press any key when it shows “Press any key to continue…”. Else setup will start from the beginning. Don’t press any key and setup will resume from where it stopped.

It will start doing other tasks and will show a small progress bar with a few details in left hand corner.

Look carefully at the details and when it shows “Installing Devices“, remember to press Shift key + F10 key in your keyboard.

This will open up a Command Prompt window. Now type nusrmgr.cpl and press the Enter key.

This opens up the “User Accounts” window which you normally get in the Control Panel.

You may have a machine(PC) with cool configs that'll make your friend's jaws drop. But within a fortnight your much loved PC begins to perform at a slower pace - this trend keeps continuing until you find it to be dead slow.

Does opening a program in your computer give you a tea break? Do you spend lots of time waiting for programs to open or close? If the answer is YES - then you need to better look under the hood (Same as what your mechanic does when you drive your car to him). A recent finding by a popular computer magazine came up with the list of software's that were the major cause for PC's to run slowly.

Have a look at the list below and make a choice when you are installing these. Look for alternatives in the web for light-weight programs that'll be as good as these or sometimes better. For example, the first on the list is Norton - I had sensed this a few years back and from that time I use AVG Anti-Virus on all my home machines - it has a free version for home use and consumes very less memory and best is that it doesn't slow down my PC.

Wednesday, September 10, 2008

A new iPod Nano has been unveiled by Apple - the new one is the thinnest iPod Apple has made so far and one that has added curved glass over its screen, a new user interface and an accelerometer that puts the iPod into shuffle mode when it's shaken. The best of it all is that Apple has slashed the price too :)

With a newly added accelerometer, the iPod will now allow for a very cool and interesting functionality that was first unveiled with the launch of the famed Apple iPhone. How it works is : if you happen to lay the device on its side it will bring up the Cover Flow view, and shaking the device would shuffle the songs in the playlist automatically - now that's really cool.

The new iPod Nano will also be available in eight different colors: silver, purple, blue, green, orange, yellow, pink, Red, and black. The new prices for the iPod Nano are: iPod Nano will retail for $149 for the 8 GB model and a cool $199 for the 16 GB model. Both are available immediately online. It'll be available in the coming week in a retail store near you.

The New iPod Touch

Apple also unveiled a new and much improved iPod touch it's got a new design adjustment. I for once feel that the iPod Touch seems to follow along the same lines as the iPhone 3G, although the Touch's back is made of stainless steel (the iPhone's is plastic as I had pointed out in my earlier article "31 Reasons Why you Shouldn't Buy an iPhone 3G!"). The rest of the features of the Touch have stayed the same, except for the addition of an accelerometer in the Touch too.

Similarly like in the Nano, the new Touch will feature the shake-to-shuffle function, as well as the Genius functionality. Apple has also added new integrated volume controls. A speaker has also been added, though at the press conference Jobs cautioned that the audio quality would only be suited for "casual listeners".

The new prices for the iPod Touch are: the 8 GB is priced at $229, the 16 GB at $299, and the 32 GB at $399.

Today the world will witness the most powerful physics experiment to ever be performed!

Scientists will begin an experiment to re-enact the Big Bang theory today. This monster of an experiment is slated to start today around 12:30 PM IST when the first beams of protons will be fired around a 27-kilometer tunnel!! The beams will also be fired in the opposite direction in about a month's time frame.

The main feature of the experiment is that the beams traveling in opposite directions will collide each other at enormous speeds. Already many critics across the world fear that this collision, could create "black holes" that would endanger the mankind and the planet forever!

The scientists will be attempting to circulate a beam of particles around the 27kilo-metre long underground tunnel which houses the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The beam will be composed of millions of individual pieces. As for the collider, it uses more than 9,000 magnets to accelerate two beams of protons to almost the speed of light. When the beams collide with each other, they will shatter into their constituent parts, allowing scientists to glimpse particles that don't exist in normal conditions - it like travelling back in time.

The CERN collider is designed to push the proton beam at almost the speed of light, whizzing 11,000 times a second around the 27 km long tunnel, 150 to 500 feet under the countryside of the French-Swiss border. This project has attracted researchers and scientists of 80 nationalities, some 1,200 of them from the United States, which contributed a whooping $531 million to the project's price tag of nearly USD 4 billion US dollars.

Tuesday, September 09, 2008

Google Chrome was released a week ago and I am pretty amazed by the fast and lean user interface. Google's Chrome is an open source web browser to compete with Internet Explorer and Firefox.

Google claims that the Chrome is designed in a lean manner to cope with the next generation of web applications which emphasize more on graphics and multimedia.

Google's website only feature's the web installer. The Web Installer comes with the nasty Google Updater - which is more like the Apple Updater and I for once don't like these crap stuff sitting in my machine. When I want to update a specific software - I will do it myself, I don't want a process to be running under the hood and checking if a new version is available every now and then.

So I found the link to a clean and OFFLINE installer for the CHROME. The offline installer is from the Google website itself. Click on the link below to download the Offline Installer of Google Chrome.

I will be shortly posting a detailed article on the features of Google Chrome too, so hang on.

Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 was launched a few days back. It comes with a rather cool feature called "Web Slices". Here's what web slice is all about.

Till now we used to goto a website to look for new e-mail's, changes in the weather reports, find the latest sports scores, current stock quotes and so on? But all this is a manual process until IE 8 came up with Web Slices.

Using Web Slices, you can get the updates of a particular part of a website directly in your Favorites Bar of the browser. If a Web Slice is available on a page, a green Web Slices icon will appears and you can easily subscribe and add them to the Favorites Bar. Whenever new information becomes available, the Web Slice gets highlighted. When you click on the Web Slice in the Favorites Bar, it previews relevant information.

The Wexley School for Girls took a dig into this feature and have presented this rather funny First Aid Kit for IE8.

Monday, September 08, 2008

You may already know how easy it is to protect Microsoft Office Excel worksheets and workbooks from unauthorized changes with the help of a password. But, what to do if you can’t remember the password you used for protecting OR you downloaded an excel from the internet and would like to have a look at the formula's or the embeded information - but all that data might be inaccessible due to the password protection.

I have a very simple method by which you can easily recover the password and also un-protect the worksheet or workbook. Please note : this method will only remove the protection from the excel file and not the password used to open the excel file itself.

Open the excel file which is password protected and goto Macro's (I am using Office 2007 so the menu's maybe different View >> Macros). Click on "Record Macro >> OK" and then click on "Stop Recording" from the same menu. Now goto "View Macros", you will find a Macro with a default name E.g. Macro1 - Select the macro name and click on Edit. Now a Visual Basic Editor opens up. Re-place the default code and Paste the below code.

Const MSGTAKETIME As String = "After pressing OK button this " & "will take some time." & DBLSPACE & "Amount of time " & "depends on how many different passwords, the "

Const MSGPWORDFOUND1 As String = "You had a Worksheet " & "Structure or Windows Password set." & DBLSPACE & "The password found was: " & DBLSPACE & "$$" & DBLSPACE & "Note it down for potential future use in other workbooks by " & "the same person who set this password." & DBLSPACE & "Now to check and clear other passwords." & AUTHORS & VERSION

Finally, run the Macro(View >> Macros >> View Macros >> Run). You will get the password of the protected workbook and worksheet in Excel. I have tested the above in Microsoft Office Excel XP / 2003 / 2007

Sunday, September 07, 2008

Seems like my weekend was marred with multiple computer issues. While I fixed the issue with "How to fix Windows Explorer crash when viewing folder with .avi / movie files?" - I had a second issue that came up. Which I suppose was caused with my several trial and error of many solutions to fix my original issue. The new problem was that none of the images files used to open up on double-click. Even When I point to the image file and ask it to open with "Windows Picture and Fax Viewer" - nothing used to happen. Simply Nothing!!

I was for once shocked and even was thinking of an eventuality to re-install my Windows XP from scratch or using a third party picture viewer like IfranView. But I just started to analyse where things could go wrong (being a techie does help :) ). I could finally zero in on a unscrupulous dll being un-registered.

Well, the solution is simple. Open the Command Prompt (Run > cmd) and type the below lines and things will start to work fine.regsvr32 /i %windir%\system32\shimgvw.dllThis possibly re installs the dll associated with the Picture and Fax viewer.

My new machine suddenly got a strange problem. I had recently upgraded my Windows XP Professional to Service Pack 3(SP3), but I donno how this strange problem started all of a sudden.

Problem : Windows Explorer hangs/crashes when opening folders that have movie files(.avi files). I searched the internet for many solutions ranging from deleting some registry keys and also un-registering some Thumbnail creation dlls. But none of the solutions worked.

Solution : Finally, this is the solution that I cam up with and it works fine now. I have DivX as well as K-Lite codecs installed in my machine. So I first upgraded my DivX Package to the latest version available on the net. Then I installed the latested package of the K-Lite codec - while installing K-Lite prompted if I would like the un-install the DivX codecs as the same were being provided by K-Lite to. Fine - since I had read a detalied article that the problem of explorer crashing could be attributed to a corrupt xVid Codec which happens to be a part of DivX package as well as K-Lite.

So I happily unistalled the DivX one and installed the complete K-LIte package and re-started my machine. All things are fixed now and even ThumbNails come up fine.

Well, the trick seems to be in installing the latest K-Lite Codec package to fix this issue and removing all the confilicting codecs from your machine. Hope this info helps all those who are struck with this problem.

Thursday, September 04, 2008

The much hyped iPhone 3G was launched in India a few weeks back and we have seen many issues and open security flaws in the new iPhone. Today, I have compiled a comprehensive list of 31 Issues - (yes 31 issues) with the new iPhone 3G. This is a must read for anyone planning to get this so called UberGizmo. The short comings of the new iPhone 3G are simply endless I suppose.

No 3G video calling even if you are over a 3G Network. (Though you maynot yet have 3G in India, but even at a later date it's not worth the 3G tag when you can't do video calls)

Blue Tooth functionality is only limited to headset use. (You can't do any file transfer over Blue Tooth)

Absolutely no camera settings - it's just like some ancient digital camera which does only point and shoot functionality.

The camera doesn't has autofocus and even doesnot have a flash. So it's more like a namesake camera.

The worst thing is that you cannot forward a SMS message!! Don't tell me I am foolish, but really your iPhone 3G can't forward a simple SMS. You'll have to retype an SMS and forward it.

There is NO copy / paste functionality. So you need to remember the texts and type again as you go.

A very Mediocre camera - it's just a 2Mega-Pixel camera. But it's been a very pathetic 2MP one to hit the market. Photos taken in the iPhone's camera look like they have been taken off a VGA camera. For a lesser price tag, Nokia N95/Sony Ericsson k850i sport a 5 Mega Pixel camera as also full screen video recording and TV-out(only in N95).

The iPhone 3G has a Plastic Outer Casing (Earlier it was Metallic casing - looks like inflation has hit iPhone too).

This piece has no FM RADIO. FM radio is even available in phones that just cost a fraction of the iPhone 3G's price.

The iPhone 3G has no option for video recording. So you can't record videos on it.

The iPhone 3G is simply overpriced in India (Costs almost twice the price as in US)

It's in built Safari web browser does not support Flash as well as Java. Yet it boasts to have a full screen browser. Most e-commerce sites aren't gonna work without Java and most entertainment sites without Flash.

There is No option to sync between Notes & To Do's. Guess Apple's engineer's haven't heard about Syncronization before.

There is No office document editor. Most Nokia's come with in-build editor's for Word / Excel.

The iPhone doesn't has AD2P on the Bluetooth - which means you can't get stereo sound via Blue Tooth headphones, that's a big damper for the music fans.

The iPhone doesn't has a Removable battery. Yes - you cannot change the battery yourself. Apple expects you to send the phone to an Apple Outlet to replace the battery. Now if you travel too much - what are you gonna do? Look for an Apple Store to interchange the travel battery? I simply can't resist my laughter being a Geek. Come'on apple for heaven's sake this is NOT an iPod - it is a phone and one cannot live without phone for 2-3 days, just to replace a battery.

iPhone doesn't has an option to send MMS. Forget about MMS.

You cannot use the iPhone as an external storage device (16 GB is of utter waste).

You can't share ANY (mp3, images,videos) files via Bluetooth.

You can't use the iPhone as a wireless modem. Though you'll end up paying ridiculous data charges to activate internet on your iPhone, but you simply can't connect it to your laptop and browse on the go.

Though you can't sent MMS - You can't receive MMS messages too!

The iPhone lacks proper support for Flash websites.

You can't set your personal songs as ring tones!

It only allows for a maximum of 1 picture to be attached to each e-mail you send!

You cannot save documents on it. The documents can only be viewed as attachments when they're sent to your e-mail address - but no option of saving onto phone.

No Voice Dialing on the iPhone 3G.

You can't send your contacts as a business card.

The iPhone's screen is not Finger Print Resistant. Since the iPhone is a touch screen phone so it is bound to get your finger print's each time you touch so it gets dirty very easily.

You can't pair it with a stereo Bluetooth headset. That's really funny inspite of the iPhone being touted as a music phone yet it does not support A2DP protocol needed by stereo headsets.

The iPhone doesn't has a built in file browser/organizer!

THE BIGGEST ONE - ONCE YOU ARE ON 3G NETWORK(Which I suppose will happen in a year in India), YOU CANNOT MAKE CALLS TO A PHONE ON 2G NETWORK. SO IF YOU WANT TO CALL A PERSON WHO IS NOT HAVING A 3G PHONE. SORRY, YOU'LL HAVE TO FIND A PCO and a 1RUPEE!!!

STILL WANT TO BUY AN iPHONE?The only reason why Apple is selling the iPhone in india at the price range of Rs.31,000 - 36,000 is because they know that there are number of people in this country who move around with money bubbling in their pockets. These are the people who spend less time in earning money and spend more time in searching the new ways to spend it. For these people, SHOWOFF is everything ( USKI KAMEEZ MERI KAMEEZ SE SAFED KAISE?) So, the APPLE guys are simply targeting these maniacs along with the help of Airtel and Vodafone to get some more money out of their pockets.

We work hard for earning Money. So spend wisely on what you invest - do more Research before you buy these crap.